Top 88 Carrie Brownstein Quotes

The Northwest, to make a generalization, is a fairly sensitive populace. Slightly self-conscious and very self-reflexive.

‘Wii Music’ elevates the scope of music video games by moving beyond commentary on what music is – as ‘Rock Band’ and ‘Guitar Hero’ do – to suggesting what it could be. Yet I’m still left wondering: Couldn’t it be more?

I’m a huge Quasi fan.

I love my friends, but I feel pretty autonomous.

My sister’s great. She’s very bright; she’s very private.

I am a horrible visual artist. I can’t fix a car, sew, knit, cook, etc. Statistically, there is more I don’t do than do.

My own relationship to food was healthy. I was lean and athletic with a high metabolism. I could eat half a pizza with a side of breadsticks and wash it down with soda. I never dieted or denied myself food.

There is a certain comfort that comes from feeling intellectually apart from phenomena. That you have the luxury of time to reflect or apply scholarly thinking to art and culture.

I think there’s a lot of wonderful comics that leave you hanging in a state of apprehension or anxiety before alleviating that tension with a joke.

Rock Band is more like Stairmaster than it is like rock ‘n’ roll – it’s the same steps with different degrees of difficulty.

For film and television, it’s interesting how fans feel that their particular ways of manifesting their affections are the correct ones. It’s not just about being a fan, it’s about how you perform your fandom. That’s always been interesting to me.

My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that, on its own, sounds unfinished.

After Sleater-Kinney broke up in 2006 I had very little desire to play music. It took well over three years before picking up a guitar meant anything to me other than an exercise.

I think my sister loves being an observer more than I do.

I was always drawn to performing. I took improv and acting classes during the summers and was involved in middle and high school plays. But when I discovered indie and punk music in high school, those things sort of took over.

I think music took hold of me and captured my imagination at such a formative age that I ascribe a mysteriousness to it, and I exalt it and take it seriously in a way that I think has just permeated my life ever since. And I’m less interested in music that is novelty or jokey or ironic.

I think that art, and making music or comedy, is a way of positing yourself on the map and then trying to find other people out there with you.

I don’t think I realized right away that I was switching from being a fan into being a performer. I’ve always tried to maintain that duality, because I think fandom is a way of being porous and curious, but it did feel like a step forward.

I loved ‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith.

I have really never aligned myself with hipsterdom or coolness.

I try, in the present, to not exalt the past because I think that’s such a way of diminishing the present. And it’s hard to live like that.

From the ashes of Bauhaus, Love and Rockets transformed its grandiosity and excesses into boldness and virtuosity. Plus, it wasn’t afraid of a catchy hook or two.

I felt like power meant that you had to be engaged in a certain kind of struggle by force of movement and battle – and that’s very exhausting. Now, power is more about certainty and stillness and realizing that the infrastructures that we gather around and worship are the least powerful things.

In Olympia, Washington, many of us were writing songs that were the equivalent of bloodletting: This is the sound a wound makes; this is the screech of a scar. But Mary Timony was always more kaleidoscope than microscope, creating magical worlds replete with weaponry or sorcery.

Rihanna has guts and she always seems to be singing from someplace honest, dark and fierce.

The game Rock Band has been haunting me like a bad ring tone. It gets stuck in my head and momentarily effaces all that I love about music.

There’s some horrible connotations in the word ‘reunion.’

I’ve always felt unclaimed.

There was a clarity to the Nineties. It was pre-9/11, before that anxiety kicked in that exists right now about the financial crisis or terrorism. We were all just going to move forward into the millennium and everything was always going to get better. Then, whoops, that didn’t happen.

I will say, as a woman, when you put a mustache on, you find out a lot of things about yourself.

Grief is sort of the allowance of feeling.

Of course, ‘Portlandia’ is all about ways that people curate their physical space and their life.

There’s something about mean-spiritedness that has a way of distancing an audience.

With sociolinguistics, after covering the basics of the field, I focused on discourse analysis.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

With Sleater-Kinney, we did a lot of improvisation in our live shows, and even our process of songwriting involved bringing in disparate parts and putting them together to form something cohesive.

I love James Baldwin’s autobiographical writing.

Nutty fans are fine with me, as I have no known nut allergy. In general, though, it’s best to carry an EpiPen to deal with outbreaks of fan nuttiness.

A lot of music for me was about – I mean, aside from the fun and challenge of writing and being really good friends with my bandmates – getting to perform.

In the early and mid 1990s, every musician I knew was obsessed with Helium. The ‘Pirate Prude’ EP and ‘Pat’s Trick’ played on repeat at nearly every gathering I attended. And we didn’t just listen to these records – we discussed them, the worlds they opened, novelistic and strange.

I wish I’d lived in New York in my early twenties. Or learned to speak more languages at a young age. I didn’t do either.

I want to have a sense of openness and optimism, even if that means being open to things that are potentially dark.

‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ was one of those films that I felt like I could dismiss because it received so many accolades, but then I watched it and was won over.

I actually think that Republican administrations are better for music. The Reagan era was such a great era for punk and indie rock.

Well, in some ways I had sort of the opposite experience of other people that are sort of dreaming of being in a rock band. I was dreaming of like corporate lunches and just like, and I’m not really joking. Like the whole idea to me was really appealing.

I’m such a big fan of ‘The Bachelor.’

I get mad at myself when I get news from Twitter before I get it from a regular news source. Then I’m off to a bad start: getting the second-hand, filtered experience all day long.

Music was a means through which I could meet people and sort of begin the process of exploring who I was or who I could be.

That’s so rare in the world of TV or film to have a genuine friendship turn into something that people watch, that people relate to. That’s so unique.

One summer, when I was elementary-school age, my neighbors and I built guitars and keyboards out of scrap wood, painted them in bright colors, and formed the cover band Lil’ ‘D’ Duran Duran. We didn’t make our own noise or even pretend to play our fake instruments.

I definitely love performing live because there are moments of spontaneity. And as much as you’re performing on stage, I feel like the audience is performing, too.

Sleater-Kinney is a band that we hold close to our hearts as well; it’s not something that we’re cynical or jaded about. We only feel gratefulness and appreciation for other people’s enthusiasm about it. We would never be annoyed by that.

In the realm of fakery, I would choose ‘Rock Band’ over ‘American Idol’ or over any of the other flimsy truths masquerading as music.

Only in retrospect can I find clues to my father’s gayness. Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present.

I’ve realized that I have a lot of different loves, and I want to pursue writing, but I can never divorce myself from music.

To really be tortured by a song, it needs to be more than just something you don’t like or don’t get; it has to make your skin crawl by getting under it. Strangely, that last clause could describe provocative or daring music, as well.

When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, ‘You waited for your father to die; why couldn’t you have waited for me to die?’ I knew then that I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden.

With Rock Band, you can play along to Black Sabbath or Nirvana and possibly find new ways of appreciating their artistry by being allowed to perform parallel to it. Rock Band puts you inside the guts of a song.

I grew up outside of Seattle and have lived here my whole life, and I think that there is a culture of questioning and guilt. Almost an ‘anti-ambition.’